I’ve been noticing that a few audio websites are now changing their business models and going with subscription.

Soundsnap.com
Soundsnap is a great place to download royalty free music clips and sound effects and was originally an altruistic concept that I guess eventually had to fall to capitalist ideals. Soundsnap will soon be changing to a subscription model where the user has to pay a monthly fee to download the sounds on the site.
Details are unclear but it is definitely going to change the basic concept of SoundSnap (which I always thought was a great idea).

YouLicense.com
One of the “big players” in music licensing has also announced that they will be going “subscription”. This time however it is on the composers’s end.
It will cost $39.95 every 6 months (or $39.95 every month, I don’t know, it is hard to tell from the wording in their newsletter and on their website) for a musician to post his music to be heard by production companies in need of licensed music.
This does away with their 9% fee for accepted material and puts a mandatory monthly payment on the composer.
They must not be turning much of a profit with their original concept to warrant such a drastic change on the end of the business model that (historically) has the least money.

Audiomicro.com
Audiomicro sells music and sound effects for extremely low prices. I’m not sure what self-respecting composer would upload to a site that pays out $0.50 for the licensing of a full length track.
Their business model seems to be an oxymoron since you can’t have “the lowest prices for the customer” *and* “the biggest payout for the composer” at the same time. It’s simply impossible.
They are also “paying you to upload” when in reality they’re giving a cash advance of $0.50 per track which you have to payback to Audiomicro (by not being paid until you sell that amount of tracks).
A quote from one of their statements is “at least somebody is paying the composers”, they were telling this to Partners In Rhyme who pays out almost $20,000 every month to their composers…
…and our composers get to keep their money 🙂

Partners In Rhyme
Partners In Rhyme has always, from the beginning, strived to help composers make a living at what they love to do. We have never charged them to join any of our websites, we have offered advice (that has been taken and profited upon) and we are always investing and developing in new features and ideas to help our family of composers make a living at composing music.